Archive for March, 2003

Currently-assigned values are defined as follows:
0x0 If the bit is set to 0, the packet has no evil intent. Hosts,
network elements, etc., SHOULD assume that the packet is
harmless, and SHOULD NOT take any defensive measures. (We note
that this part of the spec is already implemented by many common
desktop operating systems.)
0x1 If the bit is set to 1, the packet has evil intent. Secure
systems SHOULD try to defend themselves against such packets.
Insecure systems MAY chose to crash, be penetrated, etc.

Doesn’t sound real, does it. They have it in Flushing, NY! It turns out it’s mochi stuffed with some sort of sweet sesame paste. I was hoping for something spicy, but it was still good. I guess you usually eat them around new year, but I didn’t care, once I saw it, I had to have it.

We had it at the Flushing Food Court, along with all sorts of other 小吃. The Chinatown in Flushing is the absolute best. It’s the secret Chinatown in New York that is 8000 times better than the one in Manhattan.

Also 三喵 got herself a new cell phone with a built in camera. I offered to help her set up a moblog. We’ll see. We’ll see.

Found at Slashdot. Here’s the original announcement, where this unknown shows up and says “I got Linux to work, here’s how to do it” and all 800 people who have been working on this for years say “nice try, whatever, ha ha, april fool’s, go away, don’t bother us” and then post back again a few minutes later saying “Holy #*^$@(*… IT WORKS!”

Turns out “007: Agent Under Fire” (and some other games too) have a bug in the saved game handling routine, which can be exploited to run my personal favorite kind of code, arbitrary.

I find this hack very aesthetically appealing. You boot up a standard game, go to “Load Saved Game” and the Xbox goes all freaky as the cruelly composed data in the saved game causes the machine to have a heart attack and tear through its own memory, circumventing all the carefully designed encryption and lockout code. The screen blanks out, the LEDs blink, and then this alternate OS which is contrary to everything the Xbox stands for loads up quietly. The machine has been completely and totally “owned”. This is the way a system would be hacked in a Neal Stephenson novel.

We’re trying to see how much our monthly payment might be if we ever find a house, and therefore needed a mortgage interest calculator. I was amazed and astounded that the one I found was at interest.com/calculators.

台灣 (Taiwan) is famous for 小吃, or snacks. This is the kind of food you buy from vendors on the street at the various night markets. I’ve had some of this, and it’s all very good. I found a few good pages about these snacks, but they’re all in Chinese! Here they are anyway:

Ultimate home made 台灣小吃 fan site – it has maps, recommendations of which markets / streets / vendors to try, and as if that’s not enough, cute animated gifs everywhere. Warning: This site may be infected with a VBScript virus. Please practice safe browsing.

Earlier today, my weblog was attacked by some sort of evil referer spamming porn robot! It loaded my front page, many times per second, with the Referer: header set to the URLs of all sorts of porn sites. It caused my referer list to show all these porn sites, instead of the sites that actually link to me. And it was a denial of service attack, to boot.

A little research showed that the hits were coming from some server at xcite.net, a porn hosting company. So “Deny from 216.169.111.0/24” did the trick quite handily. The robot finally gave up after eating 403 errors for a while. I purged my referer table of the dirty, and now I’m back in business.

I suspect this was an automated attack. Some idiot must have downloaded a list of all active weblogs from someplace and set his script going. The motive was to get the URLs of his sites to appear in the referer lists of regular sites, hoping that some make their referers public, like I do. This may drive traffic, and possibly the coveted PageRank, to his sites. But not through me.

You will immediately go to Happy Tree Friends and watch “Eye Candy” and “Spin Fun Knowin’ Ya”. I watched some of the others, and they weren’t as good. Let me know if there’s any other really good ones.

In preparation for my exam tonight, I finally replaced the batteries in my old trusty HP 48G. But in doing so I had to clear the memory, so I lost that totally cool tetris game. It had greyscale graphics, even though the display is only black and white. It strobed the pixels at different rates to make shades of grey. I remember originally loading the game back in college: I found it on the web, downloaded it to my VAX account, then used ZMODEM over serial link to transfer that to my Amiga 1200, and finally transferred it to the calculator by a bodged up RS232 cable.

…

And finally, tomorrow’s my 29th birthday. Or 30th, if you count the first. And I think W has a special birthday surprise for me.

This item is going to sound like a bad reject from conspiracy publications like Nexus or New Dawn, or an X-Files fanzine. It isn’t. The indisputable fact is that both the US and the UK are putting serious money into anti-gravity research with military aerospace applications. The only question is how far it is from operational status. There is informed speculation that it is already used in the American B2 bomber.

I believe that access to this potentially revolutionary and obviously highly secret technology, perhaps via the JSF/F35 fighter program, could be behind the otherwise (in my view) inexplicable level of support given Bush over Iraq by Howard and Blair.

My own personal conspiracy theory about the B2 is that the $2B price tag is because it is actually nuclearpowered. (Yes, I know both of those sites say the ANP program was shut down in the 60’s. I said it was a conspiracy theory.) That’s why when you see pictures of the B2, they’re usually picturesofinflightrefueling!

Hyatt mentioned today that this Maciej Stachowiak, who I’m guessing is another Safari developer at Apple (at least he probably worked there when this was posted), just fixed the cookie bug I keep complaining about! Apparently previously Safari was handling cookies according to the old Netscape cookie spec, instead of by the RFC, which states that the cookie path “Defaults to the path of the request URL that generated the Set-Cookie response, up to, but not including, the right-most /.”

I just hope he didn’t make it so a cookie set at /foo/bar.php also gets set at /. (should be /foo .)